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Thursday, March 29, 2012

I have a class set of Mildred Pitts Walter's Ty's One Man Band. Recently we used it to practice inferring how a character feels. We studied Ty's thoughts, actions and words to figure out his emotions. This objective is very clearly written in the new Common Core standards for fourth graders. This text is rather simple so it is a good choice when working on such a complex skill.

Here is the poster I made for the reading lesson. On the left I put copies of pages from the story where Ty was feeling a certain emotion. (I highlighted the evidence.)

On this page Ty is curious. You can see that he is hiding from the mysterious stranger.

This is the worksheet I used. You can see that the students had to locate the feeling or emotion ( I gave them the page numbers). Later we added the stickies with the information about which emotion he felt and the way it was revealed to us to the poster. Youtube has the story Ty's One Man Band in a Reading Rainbow episode. We were able to watch it on the Smartboard. See it below. Christine

Sunday, March 4, 2012

This is the bulletin board I made for our owls unit. The big owl in the middle is actually a kite I found in a toy store many years ago. My favorite book that I have used for teaching about owls is Owls by Eric Weiner. I like it because the new vocabulary words like talons and species are in italics and the definitions are embedded in the text. Unfortunately it seems to be out of print. Here are some other great books for teaching about owls. Christine